Comments for drbillyohttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com
stuff that's too long for twitter.Fri, 09 May 2014 15:51:28 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com/Comment on Leaving Academia by Ned.https://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-210
Fri, 09 May 2014 15:51:28 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-210Bill – I’m gutted to hear you are leaving. There very little that is meritocratic about academic progression. On the plus side, I’m sure you’ll make a fantastic teacher. Good luck with it! Ned.
]]>Comment on Compilation Tapes by Devil Doll | Brick Wahlhttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/compilation-tapes/#comment-197
Sat, 29 Mar 2014 23:40:54 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/compilation-tapes/#comment-197[…] so long ago that we didn’t even call them mix tapes. They were the much less hip sounding compilation tapes. Like compilation albums. We made them pretending we were putting together our own personalized […]
]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by drbillyohttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-178
Thu, 19 Dec 2013 07:19:17 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-178A lot resonates in your story to mine, and as Sydni Dunn’s piece linked to above shows, we’re far from along. Sadly, like you, I see my years Postdoc as something of a waste of time career-wise, but the PhD has huge value in the “real” world.

I have read a blog piece recently which I pretty much agreed with in terms of advice to PhD-grads and potential postdocs, they need to ask themselves two questions:
1. Do you want to be a lab head and run your own group?
2. Are you willing to travel the world and forego settling down with a family (or at the very least drag them with you), to achieve this?
If the answer to these two questions isn’t yes, then I really would advise against postdocing, but even if it’s yes, it’s simply not true to say you’ve just got to plug away, you’re also going to have to get lucky. …*daft punk plays in head*….

I decided in 2008, after a period of time as a postdoc, that my heart wasn’t in it as all I saw was an ever receding chance that I might get a permanent position after several years of globe-trotting and putting my family life into suspended animation. I had written a couple of applications for grants/ co-PI, etc. and been rejected (perhaps I was a bit early in the process), but I had a similar inexplicable range of comments about my publication record. After my PhD and 18 months of a post-doc (when I started writing applications) I had a total of 12 papers with 5 first authors including a Phys Rev Lett (a top journal in my field, the go to after you have had your nature/science rejection), h-index of 8, but one referee described it as ‘mediocre’ and another as ‘limited’… All the academics I sought advice on before my applications said that they considered my publication record in my field to be ‘strong’.

I also applied for a permanent staff position at major scientific facility (to run a part of the facility co-designed by my PhD supervisor using a technique I had used throughout my PhD and postdoc) only to be rejected and offered a chance to apply for a post-doc on less money than I was on at the time in a much more expensive part of the country. The permanent staff position went to a foreign post-doc who had no experience in the technique at all. My applications to foreign scientific facilities for advertised posts were not even acknowledged.

So, I jumped ship to industry and have never looked back, much better pay and conditions, fantastic development and progression opportunities and I am treated with respect by people who previously would have looked at me down the end of their nose (professor now do what I say, not the other way around).

I have a contemporary (and friend) who decided to stick it out. He was a brilliant scientist (much more talented than I) but he was shy and preferred being a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘shaper’ so he got stuck in perma-post-doc mode until the funding ran out several years later when he was forced to take on any job he could get to support his family and he is pretty miserable. We are now drifting apart in our friendship because I feel utterly wretched talking about work as it is so obvious that my decision to get out of academia earlier was the right one. Most of my friends who have tried to stick it out are utterly miserable stuck in temporary contracts and constantly looked over for permanent positions (5 years later!!!!) in favour of foreign academics with or even without prior experience, only one of my contemporaries has made a fist of it and he really is good at talking the talk, but, imho, he is not the best scientist of the lot of us.

All in all, pretty miserable and why I advise prospective academics to seriously think hard about their choice to pursue this career as it can leave you high and dry quite easily.

I find the whole thing utterly depressing and I consider my time as post-doc to be a bit of a waste. Tbh I probably would be further on in the company if I hadn’t bothered with a PhD at all – this is what the system does to your dreams.

]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by drbillyohttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-175
Thu, 24 Oct 2013 19:56:44 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-175You are probably right of course, and I acknowledge that my lack of flexibility in being able certainly didn’t help.

On the issue of universities, two of the jobs I applied for were at non-Russell group unis.

It wasn’t so much the rejections per se, it was the conversations I had with staff in all those institutions and finding out that none of my peers were being short-listed (let alone getting the job).

I was getting plenty of advice similar to yours to keep applying and keep applying. But I saw no evidence for myself that anything would change and I was sick of commuting. So instead of moaning (bar this blog), I decided to take positive action to change my life.

P.S. Am loving teaching.

]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by Notmynamehttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-174
Thu, 24 Oct 2013 12:27:50 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-174I was in a similar position, and applied for a bunch of lectureships without getting anywhere – probably ten of them. Then I got an interview, then I got a job. It was at a fairly poor university, and I took it because my postdoc funding was running out and I needed something. After ten weeks in the job, I saw lectureships going at a better university where the other academics were closer to my interests, and I ended up getting that and moving there/here.

My point is that I was persistent and did it in a roundabout way. I applied for many more jobs than you, and got rejected a lot of times, but I got it in the end. It’s quite possible that I was lucky, but I can’t help feeling that you’ve given up a bit easily here. Four lectureship rejections is not a high number. If you talk to people who have ‘made it’ then you will often find that they got knocked back more than that. It sounds like you have a real enthusiasm for what you do (or did) and it’s a shame to give that up. It often seems like people have to lower their standards a bit – if the four you applied to were all Russell Group then it’s probably not a surprise you didn’t get anywhere.

I do sympathise, it can be ridiculously competitive and not everyone is going to get a job. Perhaps your personal circumstances are a geographical constraint, but it must have been apparent to you earlier in your career that this would be the case. Very few academics avoid moving. I’ve moved three times in the last two years, about 200 miles each time. That’s what it took to get me the job I wanted in a place I was happy with.

]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by drbillyohttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-173
Mon, 09 Sep 2013 20:35:53 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-173Guilty as charged.
]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by Anonymoushttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-172
Mon, 09 Sep 2013 20:30:36 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-172You are verbose and whingy.
]]>Comment on Leaving Academia by drbillyohttps://drbillyo.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/leaving-academia/#comment-168
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 13:29:17 +0000http://drbillyo.wordpress.com/?p=396#comment-168The pay isn’t great by any means, but it’s adequate, fair and enough to live a comfortable life. I’m not sure where you get that £18K figure from for a fellowship, but I’d suspect that’s a tax-free PhD stipend. Being a public-sector job, academia is never going to be well paid and anyone who wants to do science for the money will have jumped ship to industry immediately after their PhD, if not before.

You’re right though about the need to publish and the skewing this causes in publishing of whatever you’ve got to make a paper. We need to be accountable to the public who fund us, so I suspect our publication records will always play a big part of that, but we need to find a way of being a little more subjective about it. Assessing quality as well as quantity.